NOT THAT THEY'VE MATTERED IN DECADES:

Europe loses seat at top table: In Washington they're not sure who's in charge. In Brussels they're squabbling. Ian Traynor reports on the EU's crisis of confidence (Ian Traynor, 8 February 2010, Guardian)

The first EU summit under Van Rompuy's stewardship sees Europe slumped in a mood of unusually persistent gloom. Van Rompuy, Gordon Brown, Nicolas Sarkozy, Angela Merkel and the rest are in charge of a Europe engulfed by a sense of defeatism and decline and exhausted by nine long years of trying to construct a new European regime. [...]

"What we saw in Copenhagen is that Europe does not count," Daniel Gros, director of the Centre for European Policy Studies, told a conference of Brussels thinktanks. [...]

Obama announced last week he was too busy for a slated summit with the Europeans in Madrid in May. When Mongolia's leader, Tsakhiagiin Elbegdorj, visited Brussels last week he was nonplussed by the plethora of "European presidents" whom protocol prescribed he must meet (there are currently four).

The US state department made plain that one reason for Obama's absence is that, under Lisbon, it was not clear with whom the Americans should be dealing.

Matthias Matthijs, a Washington-based academic who is visiting professor at Johns Hopkins University's Bologna Centre, said the post-Lisbon fiasco over who is in charge may take a year to sort out. "There is a sense in Washington that Europe needs to get its act together," he said. "It's another missed opportunity for Europe. They do not have anyone to put on the world stage."

That person is supposed to be Van Rompuy or Catherine Ashton, the new EU foreign policy chief also created by the Lisbon treaty.

But no one appears to have told the Spanish prime minister, José Luis Rodríguez Zapatero, who took on the rotating six-month presidency of the EU last month determined not to forfeit any of its perks and privileges to Van Rompuy who, under the Lisbon terms, chairs all summits of EU leaders.

The Spanish government website bragged that the Obama summit in Madrid in May would be a highlight of its presidency, though it forgot to consult the Americans. In addition, in the next four months alone, the Spanish have scheduled themselves to host as many as 10 EU summits with other parts of the world.

This appetite for summitry sits oddly with perceptions of European weakness. But it is of a piece with the European insistence on disproportionate attendance at the big global pow-wows.